Left for Dead (11 page)

Howard, Margaret (Peach) and Wayne Olson, 1951.

Beck and Peach with Beck II, 1979.

It is a slander that we Southerners waste all the good names on our dogs.

My father, Arthur Kitchings Weathers, was determined that each of his sons would have a given name with some heft to it. So his firstborn became Arthur Kitchings Weathers, Jr.; I was named Seaborn Beck Weathers; and my younger brother is James Daniel Weathers. It is not my father’s fault that we are known as Kit, Beck and Dan.

I was born on December 16, 1946, in Griffin, Georgia, about thirty miles south of Atlanta. My mother, the former Emily Williams Beck, also was born in Griffin, a textile-manufacturing center of approximately 25,000 inhabitants. Griffin, which has been home to mother’s family for six generations, long ago was famous as a flower-growing center—the town once referred to itself as the Iris Capital of the World. More recently, Griffin served as the setting for the film
Driving Miss Daisy
, which won the Oscar for best picture of 1989.

My father is a native of Cairo (Kay-Ro), Georgia, a small town in the southwestern part of the state, where his father, Jesse Seaborn Weathers, served as school superintendent and postmaster, and practiced law as well. Dad majored in political science and law at Emory University in Atlanta. After his graduation in 1940, he came to Griffin as an official with the National Youth Administration, a New Deal agency set up to provide educational opportunity to young people. In his free time, he took flying lessons and earned a private pilot’s license.

My mother graduated from the University of Georgia in 1940 with a biology degree, and returned home to Griffin to teach high school. She met her future husband, the would-be aviator, at a party. They were married on a Saturday night in May 1942.

Arthur and Emily spent their honeymoon on the road to Ocala, Florida, where my father would attend army air corps flight school. They paused occasionally along the way so he could teach her how to drive his Studebaker Champion.

He expected to see combat but instead was told he’d be a flight instructor, and spent the balance of the war years teaching other young men how to fly a variety of combat aircraft, particularly P-38 fighters. My father is a gentle soul, and it probably was just as well he wasn’t required to shoot at anybody.

After the war, he sold life insurance in Albany, Georgia, for a while, and worked part-time at a car rental agency owned by my mother’s uncle. Fate then intervened in the form of the 1948 Soviet blockade of West Berlin, which changed everything for my father, and thus for his family. Lieutenant Weathers was recalled to the newly organized U.S. Air Force, and was to have participated in the Berlin airlift until a last-minute change in orders
sent him to Japan and the U.S. Army of Occupation there. Dad left for Japan in August of 1948, a week after my brother Dan was born.

That made Dad three-for-three. Because of his military obligations, he hadn’t been home when Kit and I were born, either.

Many of my earliest recollections are of Japan, where my mother brought my brothers and me in the spring of 1949 aboard an old tub, the S.S.
Gen. M. M. Patrick
, an experience that to this day she scorns as among the worst in her life. The trip began with me getting lost in the Atlanta train station—I slipped my leash and was later recovered happily seated in the colored waiting area—and deteriorated from there.

On the voyage from Seattle, Dan developed a fever and had difficulty breathing. Both Kit and I were seasick. Mother decided the
Patrick
—she called it the
Mickey Mouse Patrick
—was too unsafe for us to leave our stateroom, so that is where she stayed with the three of us for the better part of nineteen days at sea. She refused even to participate in fire drills. When at last we disembarked (my parents happily reunited on the pier after an eight-month separation), little Dan in Mother’s arms brought her adventure from hell to an appropriate close by eating her orchid corsage.

Our destination was Shiroi, a onetime golf resort the Japanese had converted into an airfield during World War II. The installation was located about twenty-five miles northeast of Tokyo. Because he had studied some law in college, my father was made base legal officer, among his other duties, and was known around Shiroi as “Judge.”

Our first quarters at Shiroi was a Quonset hut infested with
huge rats. They boldly came out each night to squeal and forage around the place. Even the big cat my parents borrowed in an effort to control the rodents was afraid of them. Arthur and Emily took turns watching out lest one of the furry devils bite us as we slept. My brother Kit thought the rats were pets.

Japanese exterminators visited us regularly, with no greater impact on the vermin population than the cowardly cat. I knew them as the “latmen,” because of their trouble with
r
’s.

I liked the Japanese gardeners, especially one old guy who didn’t have the vaguest hint about English. Of course, I spoke no Japanese, but that didn’t stop us from becoming buddies. I’d squat down next to him while he worked, chattering away.

I found one gardener’s lunch one day, fish heads and rice, and swallowed the works. My mother had me wormed.

One compensation for our down-market billet was abundant and cheap domestic help. Three Japanese women, Magai (“Margo”), Shizeko and Miyoko worked for us from eight in the morning until ten at night. The first two cleaned and cooked in return for their meals, and Shizeko received $8 a month—Margo was free, part of war reparations, believe it or not. Miyoko, whom Dad paid $12 a month, was a wizard at the sewing machine. All my mother had to do was point to a little boy’s outfit she liked in a magazine, and Miyoko would whip up three exact copies to size for Kit and Dan and me, all in the same color (usually bright) to make it easier for my mother to keep track of us in crowds.

I have two other lasting recollections of Japan. One is of the four months Dan spent at Tokyo General Hospital in a steam tent, being treated for bronchial asthma. His recovery was complicated
when a nurse knocked the steam kettle over his foot, causing a painful burn. The doctors nearly were forced to amputate.

The other is of air raid drills at Shiroi. It seemed like every other night we’d give the rats the run of the house while we went outside and hunkered down in the dark. I’m not sure who they expected to attack us—rogue elements of the Imperial Air Force, flying kites?

We sailed back to the United States in 1951 via the S.S.
Gen. E. D. Patrick
, a somewhat homier sister ship to the
Mickey Mouse
. This transport featured enclosed decks and a nursery, where Mother could park us boys from time to time. The single somber note to an otherwise pleasant, ten-day voyage was the Korean War casualties we carried home with us, stacked in caskets aboard the
Patrick
.

My father’s next assignment was Dobbins Air Force Base in Atlanta. We rented an apartment across the street from an elementary school, where I entered the first grade as a five-year-old.

I probably should have gone into kindergarten, but I wouldn’t have any part of that. I wanted to go to real school. My eyes were underdeveloped, however, and the weak muscles made it difficult for me to track the page during reading. As a result, I was placed among the remedial readers, which actually thrilled me; I loved to read and this gave me more opportunity to try it.

The return to Georgia afforded me my first real opportunity to get to know my grandparents. My father’s father, for whom I was named, was extremely reserved. As my own dear old dad
grows older, he has come to resemble his father more and more, both in appearance and demeanor.

Dad met his grandfather on only one occasion, when he was placed on a train to ride across Georgia to a meeting of Confederate Civil War veterans. My great-grandfather (I’m told) was resplendent in his Confederate uniform that day. I’m reminded that in the South Memorial Day was once celebrated as Confederate Veterans Day and the Civil War was known as the War of Northern Aggression.

The personality in that generation was my maternal grandmother, Ethel Beck, who was always upbeat and chatty. My grandmother also enjoyed some local renown for having begun one of the first Girl Scout troops in Georgia. Girl Scout founder Juliette Low even sent her a letter of appreciation.

The Weathers side of the family put great store in decorum. Coarseness we take for granted today did not exist in that household. The word
gosh
, for example, would have given my paternal grandmother, Nancy, a heart attack. Even I had the sense not to use
gosh
or
darn
in front of her. Of course, I also didn’t know any words stronger than that.

My favorite was Ethel’s husband, my grandfather Lewis Beck, whom we all knew as Pappy. He was educated as a textile engineer at Georgia Tech, and oversaw the operations of several mills in Griffin before retiring to raise flowers, a decision forced in part by Pappy’s weakness for strong waters. He was in any case a demon gardener—Jackson and Perkins, the rose people, often asked him to try out their new hybrids—and also maintained an enormous library with books on every subject imaginable. Pappy was a Renaissance man.

One of my greatest joys was for him to read Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories to me. He did all the characters, Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Fox and the rest, in perfect dialect, as Chandler wrote them, no mean feat. I’d later give baby-sitters the same books to read to me. They’d quickly become tongue-tied, so I’d read the stories to them.

Pappy was a staunch Methodist. I recall one Christmas he and I took a walk that brought us past the First Baptist Church of Griffin, where Peach and I later would be married. Glancing up at the imposing and quite beautiful structure, I asked my grandfather if this was where God lived.

“No,” Pappy replied, “but the Baptists think he does.”

In 1954, the Weathers family packed up again, this time for Brooks Air Force Base near San Antonio. My mother was horrified at the idea of moving to what she presumed was the nether edge of the civilized world. I, who was then in the second semester of my second-grade year, was delighted by the expectation of finally owning my own pony, which I’d ride to school each day and hitch to a rail, the way I’d seen in the movies.

We both were mistaken, yet San Antonio turned out to suit us fine. I didn’t get a pony, but there were millions of horned toads around, and I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed anything more than chasing after them. There was also a huge field of sunflowers behind our house. Daily, I would take a stick out there to do combat with the sunflower people. Hopelessly outnumbered though I was, I could have soldiered on indefinitely. The sunflowers probably would have persevered eternally, too, had they not eventually been plowed under.

I sailed effortlessly through the San Antonio schools during
our five-year stay there, less a testament to my brilliance than to the quality of public education in Texas. In my seventh-grade class there were at least a couple of guys who went home to the wife and kids each night.

I’ve always admired Beck. He just seemed to carve his own path. I sensed that even as a small child, and was grateful for a big brother to follow and to emulate, which I did. And I’ve liked him most of the time. He’s real headstrong and not always easy to get along with. My mom always says we fought like cats and dogs when we were young.

I remember the competition was fierce. Beck was determined to always win—and he did. It didn’t matter what it was. He was better.

Beck’s gears are always grinding. He has a need to be in the limelight. He’s always talking and intellectualizing and telling stories. There’s a lot of bravado there. I like the Beck who’s quieter, who asks me, “How are you feeling?”

Next stop on the military-brat circuit was Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, which the reader likely will recall is the U.S. Air Force base where nineteen American airmen were killed in a June 1996 terrorist truck-bomb attack.